Emily Brontë (1818–1848)Įmily Brontëwas born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, on July 30, 1818. Beckford died on May 2, 1844, at Lansdowne Crescent, after battling fever and influenza. This passion led directly to his composition of Vathek in 1786. At an early age, he read and reread The Arabian Nights. Another important trait of Beckford's was his fascination with Oriental mysticism. Like Horace Walpole, only much, much wealthier, Beckford indulged his passion for the Gothic and for collecting art with his domicile. During this time, Beckford built and rebuilt Fonthill Abbey, considered either the most amazing building or the greatest monstrosity in England at the close of the eighteenth century. He married in 1783 in a movement to save whatever was left of his reputation however, his wife died in childbirth in 1785. He would remain in England until the scandals mounted and then would retreat to the Continent for a cooling-off period.

Indeed, young Beckford's life followed this pattern repeatedly. Because of improper relationships with his cousin's wife, Louisa, and a young man named William 'Kitty' Courtenay, Beckford was sent by his mother to the Continent to give the scandal time to die down. Rather, young Beckford preferred to travel, write, spend money, and collect art. He had no desire to follow in his father's political or business footprints, much to his father's dismay. By all accounts, Beckford was brilliant, musically gifted, and highly artistic.

William Beckford, known as both the richest and most eccentric man of his time, was born September 29, 1760, in London, England. REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS William Beckford (1760–1844) A time of revolution and reason, madness and sanity, the 1750s through the 1850s provided the stuff that both dreams and nightmares were made of. In its attention to the dark side of human nature and the chaos of irrationality, the Gothic provides for contemporary readers some insight into the social and intellectual climate of the time in which the literature was produced. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ongoing fascination with horror, terror, the supernatural, vampires, werewolves, and other things that go bump in the night evinces the power the Gothic continues to exert. Hyde in the nineteenth century demonstrates both the transformation and the influence of the Gothic. Certainly, any close examination of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. There are those such as David Punter in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day and Fred Botting in Gothic who follow the transitions and transformations of the Gothic through the twentieth century. While it may be comparatively easy to date the beginning of the Gothic movement, it is much harder to identify its close, if indeed the movement did come to a close at all. The Castle of Otranto was soon followed by William Beckford's Vathek (1786) Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) Charles Brock-den Brown's Wieland (1797) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Walpole's novel was wildly popular, and his novel introduced most of the stock conventions of the genre: an intricate plot stock characters subterranean labyrinths ruined castles and supernatural occurrences. Finally, the Graveyard School of poetry, so called because of the attention its poets gave to ruins, graveyards, death, and human mortality, flourished in the mid-eighteenth century and provided a thematic and literary context for the Gothic. In addition, Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, offered a philosophical foundation. First, Walpole tapped a growing fascination with all things medieval, and medieval romance provided a generic framework for his novel. Although Horace Walpole is credited with producing the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, his work was built on a foundation of several elements. The Gothic, a literary movement that focused on ruin, decay, death, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Definition of gothic literature